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Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

A Fort Myers, FL-based cancer care organization is paying a massive price for a health data breach that exposed personal information on 2.2 million patients late last year. This incident is also shedding light on the growing vulnerability of non-hospital healthcare data, as you’ll see below.

Recently, 21st Century Oncology was forced to warn patients that an “unauthorized third party” had broken into one of its databases. Officials said that they had no evidence that medical records were accessed, but conceded that breached information may have included patient names Social Security numbers, insurance information and diagnosis and treatment data.

Notably, the cancer care chain — which operates on hundred and 45 centers in 17 states — didn’t learn about the breach until the FBI informed the company that it had happened.

Since that time, 21st Century has been faced with a broad range of legal consequences. Three lawsuits related to the breach have been filed against the company. All are alleging that the breach exposed them to a great possibility of harm. Patient indignation seems to have been stoked, in part, because they did not learn about the breach until five months after it happened, allegedly at the request of investigating FBI officials.

“While more than 2.2 million 21st Century Oncology victims have sought out and/or pay for medical care from the company, thieves have been hard at work, stealing and using their hard-to-change Social Security numbers and highly sensitive medical information,” said plaintiff Rona Polovoy in her lawsuit.

Polovoy’s suit also contends that the company should have been better prepared for such breaches, given that it suffered a similar security lapse between October 2011 and August 2012, when an employee used patient names Social Security numbers and dates of birth to file fraudulent tax refund claims. She claims that the current lapse demonstrates that the company did little to clean up its cybersecurity act.

Another plaintiff, John Dickman, says that the breach has filled his life with needless anxiety. In his legal filings he says that he “now must engage in stringent monitoring of, among other things, his financial accounts, tax filings, and health insurance claims.”

All of this may be grimly entertaining if you aren’t the one whose data was exposed, but there’s more to this case than meets the eye. According to a cybersecurity specialist quoted in Infosecurity Magazine, the 21st Century network intrusion highlights how exposed healthcare organizations outside the hospital world are to data breaches.

I can’t help but agree with TrapX Security executive vice president Carl Wright, who told the magazine that skilled nursing facilities, dialysis centers, imaging centers, diagnostic labs, surgical centers and cancer treatment facilities like 21st are all in network intruders’ crosshairs. Not only that, he notes that large extended healthcare networks such as accountable care organizations are vulnerable.

And that’s a really scary thought. While he doesn’t say so specifically, it’s logical to assume that the more unrelated partners you weld together across disparate networks, it multiplies the number of security-related points of failure. Isn’t it lovely how security threats emerge to meet every advance in healthcare?

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

As most readers know, last year was a pretty lousy one for healthcare data security. For one thing, there was the spectacular attack on health insurer Anthem Inc., which exposed personal information on nearly 80 million people. But that was just the headline event. During 2015, the HHS Office for Civil Rights logged more than 100 breaches affecting 500 or more individuals, including four of the five largest breaches in its database.

But will this year be better? Sadly, as things currently stand, I think the best guess is “no.” When you combine the increased awareness among hackers of health data’s value with the modest amounts many healthcare organizations spend on security, it seems like the problem will actually get worse.

Of course, HIT leaders aren’t just sitting on their hands. According to a HIMSS estimate, hospitals and medical practices will spend about $1 billion on cybersecurity this year. And recent HIMSS survey of healthcare executives found that information security had become a top business priority for 90% of respondents.

But it will take more than a round of new technical investments to truly shore up healthcare security. I’d argue that until the culture around healthcare security changes — and executives outside of the IT department take these threats seriously — it’ll be tough for the industry to make any real security progress.

In my opinion, the changes should include following:

Boost security education: While your staff may have had the best HIPAA training possible, that doesn’t mean they’re prepared for growing threat cyber-strikes pose. They need to know that these days, the data they’re protecting might as well be money itself, and they the bankers who must keep an eye on the vault. Health leaders must make them understand the threat on a visceral level.

Make it easy to report security threats: While readers of this publication may be highly IT-savvy, most workers aren’t. If you haven’t done so already, create a hotline to report security concerns (anonymously if callers wish), staffed by someone who will listen patiently to non-techies struggling to explain their misgivings. If you wait for people who are threatened by Windows to call the scary IT department, you’ll miss many legit security questions, especially if the staffer isn’t confident that anything is wrong.

Reward non-IT staffers for showing security awareness: Not only should organizations encourage staffers to report possible security issues — even if it’s a matter of something “just not feeling right” — they should acknowledge it when staffers make a good catch, perhaps with a gift card or maybe just a certificate. It’s pretty straightforward: reward behavior and you’ll get more of it.

Use security reports to refine staff training: Certainly, the HIT department may benefit from alerts passed on by the rest of the staff. But the feedback this process produces can be put to broader use. Once a quarter or so, if not more often, analyze the security issues staffers are bringing to light. Then, have brown bag lunches or other types of training meetings in which you educate staffers on issues that have turned up regularly in their reports. This benefits everyone involved.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that security awareness among non-techies is sufficient to prevent data breaches. But I do believe that healthcare organizations could prevent many a breach by taking advantage of their staff’s instincts and observational skills.

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